Brave New World brings a lot of new content along with new mechanics that do not, however, change or improve its gameplay. All's just chewed up. It's the same thing as with some immobile wrack, out of which you would try to make a movable cool car by just changing its transmission, respraying it with bee stripes, or by connecting a trailer to it. It just won't do. BNW is no BMW, even though it's not entirely its fault.

Brave new world is the latest expansion for Civilization V, packed with new civilizations, wonders, units and a plethora features. For a heftyBrave new world is the latest expansion for Civilization V, packed with new civilizations, wonders, units and a plethora features. For a hefty price of $30, Civilization V also gets a slight aesthetic refinement for the interface.

One of my main complaints with Civilization V Gods and Kings was the amount of multiplayer bugs the game contained and how boring late game can get. With a recent patch, multiplayer actually runs much faster. From loading times to turn times, there was clearly optimizations for multiplayer. Late game is also a lot more interesting. Firaxis has completely retooled how Ideologies work, how the culture victory is obtained, and has reintroduced the World Congress (UN in Civ IV).

Ideologies are now obtained by building three factories which signals the industrial era for your civilization, or reaching the Modern Era in the Technology tree. Ideologies now play a big part in civilization. From diplomatic relationships being strained, to unhappiness in your civilization, to revolution. It’s entirely what the game was lacking, and this retooling of ideologies really adds depth to the late game. There tends to be a lot of bickering between the AI as a result, which leads to very interesting gameplay. My first game in Brave New World resulted in a world war. Something also noticeable is no longer does each political ideology have 5 social policies to adopt, but a dozen or more. In fact, each social policy gained from your specific ideology only grants one bonus, instead of several like in Gods and Kings.

It requires significantly more culture to get all the benefits from a ideology tree, but this isn’t a problem. It’s very easy to obtain culture, with the addition of great writers/musicians/painters. All of which can create great works, which can bring in tourism from other civilizations. This leads into the new Culture victory, with the goal of being culturally influential to a specific number of civilizations. This is by far one of the best changes in the expansion.

The World congress is a more in-depth UN from Civilization IV. You can enact trade embargoes, ban specific luxury resources, enact a world ideology or religion, or even ban nukes. Depending on how you tell your delegates to vote on a issue, can result in some hatred from other civilizations. I once was given the option of voting for a world fair, adopting a world religion, or abstaining my votes for that session of congress. I places all my delegates for the world fair, and as a result I got denounced by the majority of civilizations in the game. It was quite interesting to see who my friends were after that, and this is by far a great addition to Civilization V.

Some other noteworthy additions is the inclusion of trade routes, which allows religious pressure, gold, science, food and production to be traded amongst your cities or other civilizations. Spies have the option of being a diplomat, which grants the same abilities only they do not steal technology and they can increase tourism to your cities via propaganda.

Overall, the expansion is well worth the price. Most of the additions help late game, although features such as trade routes can help with early expansion. Brave new world also introduces the features very slowly, in such a pace that it’s easy to quickly understand the new gameplay mechanics. This might be the best Civilization to date.…Full Review »

Everything in this patch is good. As was the case with Gods and Kings, we can applaud that the game is finally developing into something worthEverything in this patch is good. As was the case with Gods and Kings, we can applaud that the game is finally developing into something worth playing. Which just kind of goes to show what a few of us noted when Civ 5 came out at first. This was a DREADFUL game at launch. This is a very good expansion and fans of the game should run forth to buy it to support their beloved developer. However I find $26 pretty rich in the ongoing saga of repairing a severely deficient experience. As another reviewer said: it's quite sad that Fireaxis and 2K made us go through two main DLC before we can have the feeling of what should have been Civilization V at start. I recommend holding off on playing the game till they finish it and bundle the whole thing as a single price title.…Full Review »